Tissue culture vessels are used in the laboratory for many purposes. Typically, these vessels are used to culture microorganisms or tissues in a culture medium or agar which is adhered to an interior surface of the vessel.
Cell culture vessels which allow expansion into multiple additional connected vessels are known; however, traditional expansion changes the overall footprint of the culture. The traditional method entails a seed culture in a small T-flask, followed by a series of passages into even larger vessels. However, this procedure is not only a highly laborious process, but each passage represents a significant chance for contamination into the culture. Further, using multi-level, rigid plastic culture devices are unsatisfactory, as there is no way to prevent media from being contained to a select subset of the culture layers. Further, these multi-layered plastic vessels do not scale linearly, thus suggesting there may be an issue with oxygen transport. Other known existing products pose short-comings as well. For example, prior art culture cassettes are not designed to allow for in situ expansion.
Prior art expansion vessels have used a longitudinal divider for separating expansion chambers. While these expansion vessels are suitable for projects which require only a limited increase, they are unsuitable to expand vessels such that the relative expansion is on a larger order.